[jwplayer Ri0Q4E7a]
Bryson DeChambeau has been called a lot of things, but a phony should not be one of them.
He is often ridiculed on social media for, among other things, his “Mad Scientist” shtick. It would be one thing if it was just the keyboard commandos trolling him, but even DeChambeau’s fellow competitors — from Brooks Koepka, who isn’t afraid to fire shots publicly, to those in the caddie yard — roll their eyes at some of his outlandish claims. In a recent ESPN.com article, Justin Thomas said the following:
“I’m the farthest thing from Bryson [DeChambeau],” Thomas says. When I ask if he thinks Dechambeau’s physics-professor image is genuine, he shrugs and adds, “I don’t think so. I’m not even sure he himself knows what he’s saying sometimes. But either way, that’s not me.”
Last June, on the day after the U.S. Open, I drove 3-plus hours from Pebble Beach Golf Links to Dragonfly Golf Club in Madera, California, and spent the day with instructor Mike Schy and his talented assistant Jordan Keyser at Schy’s Golf Performance Institute, where DeChambeau cut his teeth and the motto is, “Only if you want to get better.”
Schy is one of the most creative minds in golf instruction. He’s from the Ben Doyle school, a disciple of The Golfing Machine, and has taken Doyle’s famed golf cart filled with a thousand training aids and expanded the concept into a tented area. Schy’s on his third tent at Dragonfly and there’s a gazillion self-made gadgets that Schy can turn to – “If I can’t buy it, I build it,” Schy said. DeChambeau’s original set of one-length clubs? They “garage-punked” them here, slathering the long irons with more than $200 of lead tape. They drilled holes and burned through three grinding wheels to achieve the proper weight in the wedges. It took three weeks to assemble. In other words, DeChambeau happened to have the perfect instructor for him conveniently near his hometown of Clovis.
If anything, DeChambeau suffers from an inferiority complex. He doesn’t think he’s as good as he actually is so in his mind he has to find some edge — whether it is determining a perfectly balanced golf ball in Epsom salt or using a protractor (drawing compass) on the greens — so he can win.
That is why even though he had just shot 66 at Muirfield Village Golf Club to take the 54-hole lead at The Memorial, he returned to the range at 7:30 p.m., for another hour-plus session and closed the place in darkness.
“I’d have to shoot 54 to walk straight to the car,” DeChambeau told me.
“He’d still hit one ball,” DeChambeau’s caddie, Tim Tucker, said.
DeChambeau continues to bulk up, weighing in at 239 pounds this week, during the COVID-19 induced downtime and has talked about getting even bigger. He says 270 isn’t out of the question. C’mon! Whatever he’s doing, it’s working. (Schy used to have DeChambeau swing a heavy broomstick, and said the resistance it creates helped improve his swing speed.) DeChambeau ranks first in driving distance this season averaging 321 yards, nearly 19 yards farther than last season and third in Strokes Gained: Off the Tee, up from 24th last season. DeChambeau also recorded a ball speed of 203 mph with his Cobra drive last week during the “Speed Zone challenge.” That’s ridonkulous.
None of this surprises Schy or Keyser.
“We call it Bryson’s way,” Schy said.
Which means he’s going to turn over every stone in search of marginal improvement. Sometimes, it takes him on a wild goose chase, and other times he strikes gold. But Schy will just laugh and say that’s Bryson’s being Bryson.
Schy showed me a drill using his favorite training aid, a yardstick. He gives away at least a hundred each year. DeChambeau carries four of them in his bag and uses it for alignment, aim, foot and ball position and more. In one drill, he’d have DeChambeau roll putts down the yardstick. I asked Keyser, who grew up practicing with DeChambeau here and played competitively in college before joining Schy as an instructor, what’s the longest she’d seen him do the drill?
“He won’t leave until he does so many in a row that go to the end perfectly,” she said. “His belief was if you’re going to set up a drill, if it takes an hour or six hours, you’re getting better.”
Yes, she’s seen him do the same putting drill for six hours.
Another drill that Schy likes his students to do is hit a tire. It teaches them not to flip their hands. The goal is to get the whole shaft on the tire and prevent the head from bouncing. If the core is engaged, you’ll keep the shaft against the tire. Schy has an old extra-loop radial and here’s the story Schy tells and that Keyser witnessed that convinces me that DeChambeau is anything but a fraud:
He used to move the tire about a half-inch up and down the range. He also would do the tire drill in a bunker, which was even tougher (I tried it. This is straight out of a “Rocky” movie.)
“One time, Bryson did it for 4-5 hours. I think that was also the day we challenged him not to talk for 6 hours. That was a good day,” Schy said.